January 14 - February 20, 2016

Gallery 1C03 at The University of Winnipeg is pleased to host Methods of Preservation, an exhibition of new work by emerging Winnipeg artist Ashley Gillanders. Methods of Preservation is Gillanders’ first solo show in a public art gallery and it signals a departure from her preceding photographic work. While her earlier pieces were presented in a traditional format – as prints hung flat against walls – Methods of Preservation is a series of photographic sculptures enclosed by Plexiglas covers and perched on pedestals or shelves.

For Methods of Preservation, the artist dismantles portions of tropical house plants, photographs the severed pieces, prints them to scale, and reconstructs them as distinct three-dimensional arrangements. Working with domestic objects considered mundane in their original form, Gillanders transforms them, thereby highlighting their preciousness and disrupting our expectations of the photographic medium. The presentation of her transformed subjects – exotic plant species – during Winnipeg’s frigid winter months emphasizes further their displacement as photographic sculptural objects.

In her artist statement, Gillanders notes that her goal is to both confront and accept conventional definitions of the medium of photography. On the one hand, she seeks to challenge the two-dimensional physicality of the photographic print, but she also acknowledges that she is working within photography’s tradition of capturing a particular moment. “Outside of the work”, she notes, “these living objects continue to change but they remain preserved in photographs at specific moments in time”.

Ashley Gillanders is an emerging photographic artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba whose practice incorporates traditional and experimental approaches to photography to explore the relationships between nature, humans, and their environments. She graduated from The University of Winnipeg Collegiate and obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours degree from the University of Manitoba, School of Art. Upon completion of her BFA, she participated in residencies and mentorships at Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (Manitoba), The Banff Centre (Alberta), and the School of Visual Arts (New York). She has been the recipient of grants from the Winnipeg Arts Council and the Manitoba Arts Council. Her works have been shown locally at Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts and Actual Contemporary, and her series All Things Considered was presented by One Night Stand in 2013.